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Introduction
Pages 1-10

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From page 1...
... Beginning in the late 1980s with welfare reform initiatives in a few states around the country and continuing in the first half of the 1990s as more states made changes in their income support programs, welfare reform culminated at the federal level with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
From page 2...
... Early in its deliberations, particularly after reviewing the large number of socalled "welfare leaver" studies studies of how families who left the TANF rolls were faring off welfare the panel realized that the database for conducting studies of welfare reform had many deficiencies and required attention by policy makers and research analysts. In its final report, the panel concluded that welfare reform evaluation imposes significant demands on the data infrastructure for welfare and low-income populations and that ".
From page 3...
... They also briefly review methods of weighting and imputation to adjust for nonresponse after the fact. The authors then discuss the details of the survey process, including the exact process of contacting a respondent and how barriers to that contact arise, noting that welfare reform may generate additional barriers (e.g., because welfare recipients are more likely to be working and hence not at home)
From page 4...
... They then discuss specific issues in increasing response rates, including obtaining contact information in the presurvey process (e.g., from administrative records) ; obtaining informed consent to gather information needed for subsequent tracking; address-related problems with mail surveys; methods for tracing hardto-locate respondents; dealing with answering machines; the importance of highly trained interviewers, echoing the emphasis of Groves and Couper; considerations in questionnaire design, including the critical nature of the introduction; and refusal conversion.
From page 5...
... A detailed review is then provided of what is known about measurement error in reports of transfer program income, child support income, hours of work, and unemployment histories. Finally, the authors list a number of issues that should be addressed that can help reduce measurement error, including proper attention by cognitive experts to comprehension of the question by respondents, care for the process of retrieval when writing questions, the use of calendars and landmark events, and a number of other questionnaire design topics.
From page 6...
... The authors begin by noting the importance of "cleaning" administrative data in a comprehensive sense, namely, converting what are management files into analytic files suitable for research use. They also note the importance of matching records across multiple administrative data sets (i.e., record linkage)
From page 7...
... Employment and income are, of course, two of the key outcome variables for welfare reform evaluation and hence assume special importance in data collection. They find that there often are differences in administrative and survey data reports of employment and income and that the differences are traceable to differences in population coverage, in reporting units, in sources of income, in measurement error, and in incentives built into the data-gathering mechanism.
From page 8...
... WELFARE LEAVERS AND WELFARE DYNAMICS An initial focus of concern of policy makers has been the effects of PRWORA on people who left AFDC and successor TANF programs- "welfare leavers." In response to a congressional mandate, ASPE provided grant funds to states and counties to analyze administrative records and conduct surveys of two cohorts of welfare leavers. In fiscal year 1998, ASPE provided grant funds to 14 jurisdictions (10 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 counties or groups of counties)
From page 9...
... The paper also compares some findings of leaver studies across studies that use different methodologies to illustrate points about comparability. The second paper, "Preexit Benefit Receipt and Employment Histories and Postexit Outcomes of Welfare Leavers" by Ver Ploeg, uses data from the state of Wisconsin to analyze welfare leavers.
From page 10...
... 1999 Evaluating Welfare Reform: A Framework and Review of Current Work. Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs.


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